US Markets
Cloudflare Sell-Off Offers Buying Opportunity as Project Glasswing Concerns 'Overblown,' Oppenheimer Says
Cloudflare's (NET) stock sell-off offers a buying opportunity, while concerns around Project Glasswing are "overblown" as the cloud-services company is seen benefitting from a projected exponential growth in agentic artificial intelligence applications, Oppenheimer said Friday.Oppenheimer's upbeat outlook for Cloudflare comes as its shares tumbled 8.6% Thursday, which the brokerage attributed to competitive concerns around Anthropic's Project Glasswing initiative and a broader market weakness. Cloudflare shares were down 13% in Friday late-afternoon trade, bringing its year-to-date losses to nearly 15%.Project Glasswing is a cross-industry coalition formed to "secure the world's most critical software," Anthropic said in a statement. The alliance, which will be using Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos frontier model, includes Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Apple (AAPL), Broadcom (AVGO), Cisco (CSCO), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Palo Alto Networks (PANW).Cloudflare is not part of the coalition.The concerns over Project Glasswing are "overblown," with the Cloudflare stock sell-off providing a "tactical buying opportunity," Oppenheimer analysts Param Singh and Jake Heimowitz said in a note to clients Friday. Claude Mythos will "proactively find and fix vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure," they said."We want to highlight that Cloudflare's security sales are tied to its physical network, which is necessary to funnel data traffic," the analysts wrote. "We see Cloudflare as a beneficiary of this growing sophistication in frontier models, which will support exponential growth in agentic AI applications and benefit Cloudflare across delivery, security, and compute."Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of global internet traffic volume, with Oppenheimer seeing the company as a share gainer and beneficiary from an "increasingly agentic web," the analysts said. Agentic AI is expected to drive data traffic growth at a compound annual growth rate of more than 20%, according to the note.The brokerage, which has an outperform rating on the Cloudflare stock, said its checks indicate an accelerating customer spend with the company amid "higher security module and compute attach."Price: $167.26, Change: $-25.79, Percent Change: -13.36%
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